Gottlieb Garvo

The early music ensemble “Die Freitagsakademie” is still committed to its namesake, Johann Gottlieb Janitsch, and makes music for his immensely rich oeuvre.

The early music ensemble “Die Freitagsakademie” is still committed to its namesake, Johann Gottlieb Janitsch, and makes music for his immensely rich oeuvre. The chamber music gems presented here (two of them as first recordings) bear impressive witness to Janitsch’s equally elegant and imaginative compositional art. They combine the melodic sweetness of the “galant” style popular around the middle of the 18th century with contrapuntal finesse and expressive harmony.

This acclaimed edition covering the early 20th century’s fashionable wave of hot dance music from America into Europe now takes us to Switzerland. One luxury hotel owner was able to boast that ‘only here, and at the Savoy Hotel in London, can you hear real jazz’. The trend for hotel bands spread its influence to all corners of ‘light’ and ‘classical’ musical culture, and Switzerland, as a popular destination for international travel, became an epicentre for this worldwide dance fever. 20th Century Foxtrots, Vol. 5 presents more evocative piano rarities from this Golden Age, performed with panache and grace by Gottlieb Wallisch.

This project featuring the complete recording of Beethoven’s piano concertos on original Beethoven fortepianos has close ties to the performances at original historical sites in Vienna. During past years the concert series “Resound Beethoven” has brought back Beethoven’s works to the places where they are documented to have been performed. It has been possible to perform and in part to record the complete cycle in halls such as the Eroica Hall in the Palais Lobkowitz, the Festsaal of the Akademie der Wissenschaften, and the Niederösterreichischer Landhaussaal. For Gottlieb Wallisch this was a unique experience, a veritable immersion in the sound world of Beethoven’s times: “The combination of the fortepiano sound with the original-sound orchestra results in a fascinating opportunity to shed new tonal light on Beethoven’s music and to understand it in new ways.

In his day the now-forgotten Carl Gottlieb Reissiger (1798–1859) was highly esteemed, both as conductor and composer; indeed, his presence in Dresden from 1826 made it one of the main operatic centres in Germany. He wrote nine operas himself, as well as a huge quantity of vocal music (including at least twelve Masses), and his large output of chamber music boasts no fewer than 27 piano trios. These two early exemplars in this first-ever complete recorded cycle of those trios have a Mendelssohnian elegance and clarity, deepened here and there by a touch of Beethovenian pathos.